Doesn't matter if you're the best programmer in the world once you hit 40 - it's up or out, and there aren't that many "up" jobs.

Just hit 40, and I try to hide from recruiters, really.. My Linkedin inbox is filled with messages that I didn't care to respond to, from all the top name companies and hot startups. Either the job market in the valley is so hot or the above premise is false.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday November 12, 2010 @06:52AM
from the dead-or-alive dept.

ashidosan writes "Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. 'The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.'"
Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.

Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @10:39AM
from the older-I-get-the-wetter-mars-was dept.

Matt_dk writes "Spectacular satellite images suggest that Mars was warm enough to sustain lakes three billion years ago, a period that was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the surface, according to research published today in the journal Geology. Earlier research had suggested that Mars had a warm and wet early history but that between 4 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, before the Hesperian Epoch, the planet lost most of its atmosphere and became cold and dry. In the new study, the researchers analysed detailed images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the red planet, and concluded that there were later episodes where Mars experienced warm and wet periods."

Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @01:40PM
from the concealed-carry-in-australian-waters dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an AP report: "Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. ... 'I was gobsmacked,' said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. 'I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh.'"

It should get a lot of traction since Android has a fantastic API, written by very smart developers for developers. I was playing with it briefly and was very impressed. The setup was breeze and tooling (Eclipse integration) is excellent! Do people who write Android apps for a living concur or there any issues in scaling?